A bold vision that empowers communities to solve our cities’ most pressing problems

Amid political repression and a deepening affordability crisis, Budget Justice challenges everything you thought you knew about “dull” and daunting government budgets. It shows how the latter confuse and mislead the public by design, not accident. Arguing that they are moral documents that demand grassroots participation to truly work for everyone, the book reveals how everyday citizens can shape policy to tackle everything from rising housing and food costs to unabated police violence, underfunded schools, and climate change–driven floods and wildfires.

Drawing on her years of engagement with democratic governance in New York City and around the globe, Celina Su proposes a new kind of democracy—in which city residents make collective decisions about public needs through processes like participatory budgeting, and in which they work across racial divides and segregated spaces as neighbors rather than as consumers or members of voting blocs. Su presents a series of “interludes” that vividly illustrate how budget justice plays out on the ground, including in-depth interviews with activists from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Barcelona, Spain, and Jackson, Mississippi, and shares her own personal reflections on how changing social identities inform one’s activism.

Essential reading to empower citizens, Budget Justice explains why public budgets reflect a crisis not so much in accounting as in democracy, and enables everyone, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to imagine and enact people’s budgets and policies—from universal preschool to affordable housing—that will enable their communities to thrive.

Celina Su is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and professor of political science at the City University of New York, a former Senior Democracy Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the recipient of a Berlin Prize in public policy. She is a coauthor of Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education and the author of the poetry collection Landia. Su’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Boston Review, The New Republic, and n+1. Since 2015, Su has served as chair or cochair of the URBAN Research Network, a coalition of scholars and activists committed to community-based research and social change.